1. Field of The Invention
The invention relates to machines for destructively shearing connectors, wires, and electronic components from the surfaces of circuit boards.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is desirable and economically rewarding to recover or salvage valuable and scarce materials such as gold, silver, platinum, palladium, gallium, germanium, antimony, and iridium found in leads, connectors and other components attached to used, discarded, and defective electrical circuit boards, particularly those found in electronic devices such as computers. Typically, such circuit boards with attached components are placed in ball mills and ground into a powdered ore. Samples of the powdered (circuit board) ore in each batch are then assayed to determine content and a value per unit quantity is ascertained. With present trends of obsolescence in the computer industry, components, leads, and connectors attached to circuit boards comprise a very large and relatively accessible source of valuable raw materials. For example, backplane connector assemblies from obsolete IBM mainframe and mid-sized computers comprise a relatively copious source of gold.
The largest relative material components in circuit boards are fiber glass (epoxy and silicon) followed by copper, i.e., the basic substrate materials of printed circuit boards. Obviously, separating the basic circuit board substrate from the attached leads, connectors and other components before and milling the leads, connectors and components separately will produce powdered ores having much richer assays of valuable materials and greater values per unit quantity. However, separating or cutting such leads, connectors and other components from circuit board substrates is a time consuming, arduous and, consequently, costly endeavor.